Center for the Arts Presents the Trisha Brown Dance Company

Hailed as “the innovative high priestess of postmodern dance” by The New York Times, Trisha Brown is celebrating 40 years of presenting abstract dance. Her nine-member company has challenged the boundaries of contemporary dance since she founded it four decades ago.

The Trisha Brown Dance Company will appear at the Center for the Arts Concert Hall on Saturday, April 30 at 8 p.m., bringing an intimate evening of extraordinary dance. The performance program includes the Washington, D.C., area premiere of one of Brown’s newest works, 2011’s “Les Yeux et l’âme,” performed to music from the opera “Pygmalion” by Rameau. The evening also includes music from 1990’s “Foray Forêt,” 1978’s “Watermotor” and 1980’s “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation.”

Brown first gained public attention as a founding member of the experimental Judson Dance Theater in New York City in the 1960s. In 1970, she formed her own company and debuted her groundbreaking “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building,” one of many works that Brown staged in alternative performance spaces in her SoHo neighborhood, investigating the relationship between dance movement and gravity.

In the last 40 years, the company, with Brown as artistic director, has gone from performing inventive works in Manhattan neighborhoods to circling the globe, dancing on the stages of landmark opera houses, on rooftops and walls, in galleries and museums and floating on water.

Based in New York City, the company maintains an education program that provides training through classes and workshops in post-modern dance to aspiring dancers. The education program also fosters the preservation of works from its repertory through restaging projects with the Lyon Opera Ballet and Paris Opera Ballet, and universities around the globe.